Having had to make Lilo boot Linux on these boards I have some familiarity with
them. They don't have a standard BIOS, so they don't support the standard
routines that the newer bootloader expects (e.g. memory sizing). If you have
more questions feel free to follow up off list - I doubt the particulars of
these boards or CDS' custom/hacked version of FreeBSD 3.0 are of much interest
to those on the list. If need be I can contact the person who designed the
board - I know it is a bit of a kludge but he was working on a very limited time
frame. Also you'll find that the MAC address is stored on the boot ROM. Maxtor
has moved from FreeBSD to the Windows SAK so the newer boxes are likely to
have full BIOS support (they could not keep any of the CDS developers to
maintain the FreeBSD code base).
On Thu, 20 Jun 2002, Bruce A. Mah wrote:
> Sorry to interrupt various flamewars with some actual technical
> discussion... :-)
>
> At ${REALJOB}, we've got a couple of Maxtor MaxAttach boxes we're trying
> to play with. These are dedicated NFS/SMB servers. Physically they are
> 1U boxes with four 70GB IDE disks on them (wd0, wd1, wd2, wd3). They
> have Pentium (P55C) processors, 128MB of RAM, an on-board fxp device, no
> slots, and no removable media devices, all this on what appears to be a
> semi-custom motherboard. We managed to find a serial console with the
> help of a multimeter and an oscilloscope. The OS appears to be a
> stripped-down FreeBSD 3.X...they have some kind of concatenated disk
> driver that seems similar to ccd(4).
>
> For various reasons, we're trying to figure out how to get a stock
> FreeBSD 4-STABLE on them. We tossed in a scratch disk with 4.5-STABLE
> as the primary master disk; the machine wouldn't even give a loader
> prompt. We also tried booting with the existing wd0 and wd1, and our
> disk on the secondary master; we could boot, but got a kernel panic
> during an attempted boot to single-user mode...I suspect in the
> concatenated disk driver trying to do some consistency checking.
>
> I should mention that with all four of the original disks installed,
> it functions properly, if slowly, as an NFS server. We're trying not
> to wipe out the existing boot disk until we have at least a warm, furry
> feeling that this is going to work. We haven't gotten that yet.
>
> In theory we could put a populated obj/ tree on the existing disks and
> use this to do a installkernel/installworld, but this commits us to a
> course of action really early without an easy way to back out if
> something goes wrong (see last paragraph).
>
> Has anyone played around with one of these boxes?
>
> Thanks in advance!
>
> Bruce.
>
> PS. It's crossed my mind that the staff time involved in making this
> work could quickly exceed the cost of buying equivalent (maybe even
> better) "normal" hardware. :-)
>
>
>
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